


Karyai

by Thel Ihveen (FancyMando)



Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Mandalorian, Mando'a
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-21 16:37:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12461697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FancyMando/pseuds/Thel%20Ihveen
Summary: The retired Imperial freighterDokmacarries a lot of memories in its shadowy, silver halls, and even more in its main galley. The Mandalorian word for it iskaryai- the central living space, the heart of the home. Here, Eedee Ihveen, an aging Mandalorian pirate, has installed a gigantic dining table cut from a tree grown on her homeworld, and very quickly the plain wood becomes marked by the stories of two generations ofmando'adeand the life they share.





	Karyai

**Author's Note:**

> This is a backstory piece for my gaggle of Star Wars OCs, whom I developed to accompany my protagonist, Thel. She's a character I designed and built for a custom Mandalorian costume, and many armor-builders are encouraged to have backstories for the characters they portray. Here's my take on a somewhat-dysfunctional mando family. Enjoy!

It was an old ship when she got it. Old Imperial, from the war, Gozanti class. The first thing Eedee did was repaint it – have the gray sandblasted off. The woman who sold it to her was happy to oblige, and she stood on the ridge overlooking the plain and watched the tan and blue go on. Blue: reliable.

The second thing she did was rip out the steel galley table. _Too sterile_ , she said. _Won’t do_. The replacement came from her homeworld, from a single heavy veshok tree. Like her, it had been milled down from something wild and gnarled, and then lacquered heavy, and then marred and marked by life and lacquered again.

The armor Eedee wore had been repainted when he left her. He didn’t want to go, but the doctors couldn’t do much. She was a snow queen, the spray against black stones, a broken piece of glass after a crash landing. Blue flecks in the brown knots that she didn’t catch before they dried. He had not worn the armor – he wasn’t one of her people. It wasn’t his tradition. They had a word for outsiders but she fought it off like a swarm of throwing knives.

She sat at the huge old table and poured herself a glass of clear, strong liquor. She drank in silence and stared at the grain that ran the length of the table. She watched the first chip appear along the side of her right forearm, on her vambrace. It had been raw metal, iron. Now, it shined and shined, pearl and sky and gold.

She didn’t feel royal.

There was a poor girl on a station, and Eedee picked her up as a deckhand because the kid’s family had kicked her out. She could tell by the look in the kid’s eyes that it was a lie. She’d run. Six siblings and all of them had been told their sister no longer loved them enough to care for them.

Eedee scoffed. _Get in, kid. You like travel?_

The girl was fifteen. Vatari. Princess, Eedee would call her. As tall as she was going to get and there were credits to spare and she’d started picking up words, songs, stories. Time for her to have a set as well. The two of them sat at the big old table and shared a bottle when the painting was done. Red paint, now. Love for a parent: ironic, considering how they’d treated her. They told each other their lives from before they became family. The color transferred from plates when arms and elbows scraped the wood. _Karyai_ – the central room in a house, the gathering place.

Simple words, that’s all it took. _My kid. You’re my kid, I’ve got you._ And just like that, Eedee was a mother for the first time. She now knew why her daughter wore red.

On a raid on a passenger ship ferrying weapons, years later, the Vatari took pity. She should’ve but a hole in his head, but she didn’t. Why not? But there were rooms to spare on the ship – old bunks they used to keep the whitejobs in and good food, too.

One night over dinner, Eedee slapped down a pan of rolls. _Terrible,_ she said. _Bad batch this time._ _But you can have them, if you want._ They vanished quickly anyway and while she was doing the dishes, Eedee looked the man in the eye and told him he was one of them, now. Pirates. He said he didn’t want the armor but when he married her daughter, his new mother-in-law had a necklace made. A replica of the plate that protected his wife’s heart. He wore it.

Then there were kids, lovely creatures, two boys a few years apart. Teryn and Dack. When they started getting older, Eedee would hear their parents arguing down in the hold. About what, she was never certain.

One day, when the boys were ten and thirteen, their mother came up the stairs with a fat lip and a bruised cheek. Their father came up with a broken nose. Later, Vatari told her mother to stay out of it.

Eedee told her son-in-law that if he ever touched her family again, she’d kill him.

The day Dack came crying to his mother with a bruised jaw, she put on her red armor and asked to stop on some farm world, and her husband followed, both of them yelling.

Eedee held a cold pack to her grandson’s soft face until she got the call to put the ramp down.

Her daughter’s cheeks were flush and slick with tears, and in one fist she clutched her husband’s red metal heart. She smelled like mud and blaster smoke.

Her mother knew better than to ask. They sat down that night with two bottles and picked at the surface of the long table and talked. It had been like this for years. He wasn’t coming back. Vatari wore his heart under her armor, though.

Months later, there was another baby. A little girl. Jenz. Vatari promised her she would have a heart of iron. _Kar’ta_ _beskar_.

The kids learned quickly. Raids, breaching hulls, shootouts, fist-fighting. They put dagger-marks in the wood and left rings from glasses of milk, and then they painted. Black and blue: justice. That was the boy that got hit. Green and yellow and orange: duty, lust for life. Blue and tan like grandmother, _ba’buir,_ like their home.

Their mother listened as the Teryn finally brought a girl home, late at night while they were parked on another industrial world. One of their people, _mando’ad_. The two of them stayed up and talked, just talked, hunched over the galley table. They were still there in the morning, asleep. The girl’s silver helmet shone like starlight.

There was war. Another one – nobody had seen the last of war, it seemed, but the ship was fast enough to outrun anything, even the burning galaxy. _Manda’yaim_ was not so lucky, never had been. _N’jate’kara_. Eedee cried the night word came – her birthplace, bombed. Not just burned, but wiped off the map. Hunks of dirt and stone wrenched from the hearts of the mountains. That was the price her people paid. Blood money.

They couldn’t escape it. Business was good – scattered ships, salvageable parts, a buyer back home willing to purchase wrecks to help recoup her losses. They were navigating a debris field – ship blasted from orbit – when they found an escape pod. Life.

She couldn’t say no. There was a man and a half in there – one living, one dead. They rushed the survivor to the medbay and he cried and cried. A week in the tank, healing, and replacement limbs that were disturbingly cheap for what they were, lately. Supply and demand.

He was a mechanic and a soldier and cooked a mean vegetable stew. The old him was dead, died in that pod with the man he loved. He said his name was Rassth Varyl, but he hesitated halfway through. Eedee liked him. They kept him.

A new set of armor – cheaper this time, because of the destruction. They found new metal, deeper down. Gray. The queen asked him to try adding color, but he said he wouldn’t. Gray it was. Lost love. He refused to take it off unless he had to.

The kids left, like they always would. She knew it. Just because her daughter stayed didn’t mean the rest had to – the soldier boy was off again, in and out, doing what he’d done since he was a child. The newlyweds ran off to some exotic locale and got mixed up in something they maybe shouldn’t have. That was okay. After all the odd jobs, they all came back. Something about home, family, their old lives, new lives.

One day her grandson dragged home a half-conscious city kid and his wife covered her bruises with makeup in the medbay and she had fire in her eyes. _Another one_ , she thought. _Okay_. Something new, something different. She was already fighting, fighting everyone, everything. Breaking fingers and sharpening fingernails and asking to learn. Show me to shoot a carbine. Teach me every chokehold you know. Not like Rassth – he’d been born into it, just in a different way. This was new. Her name was Thel. 

Eedee sat across the long dark table from her, asked her why. They got no thanks, no medals. They had only one home – the endless void, punctuated by forests of glass and stone. Blasterfire, blood and metal. _Why us? Why work yourself to the bone, let yourself burn, yell and fight and claw your way in?_

The kid looked at her. _Home_ , she said. That was all.

 _Aliit,_ Eedee said _. That’s our word for it._

Violet paint: nontraditional, so the meaning depends on who you ask. Appreciation of the arts. Tackling adversity. Sheer luck. All fit. Thel left her mark on the wood like the rest of the family, and then added some yellow, too - the can of phosphorescent marking paint one of the boys brought home because Eedee had hurt her foot walking in the dark. She was getting old. One day, she gave Thel her old westar, grimy as it was. _You’ll need this_ , she said.

The ship, though, was full of life.

Rassth had learned to cook and cook well out of sheer fascination – or was it spite? – and he tried any recipe he could get his hands on and then taught it to Thel. Language – their old tongue – sprung up from the cracks in the walls and broke into song. Shevla, the son of the woman who sold them the ship in the first place, started hanging around late at night while they had repairs done. Thel would open his cans of sugary drink with her knife and hand them back with a smile.

There were toasts when Teryn announced he’d be a father. Laughter and games and the sharpening of knives – for cooking, for fighting, for cutting fabric. Thel learned how to clean a blaster and Rassth learned to clean his leather. Jenz caught Shevla with Thel in the refreshers, kissing. Someone brought home a stray tooka, an injured bird, a snail in a jar. _Mando’ade_ were like that – waifs and strays.

Some nights, there were tears: Teryn, worried sick about his wife, the future of his child. Dack, disillusioned with his life. Rassth, still in armor, when he could not sleep and needed a drink to dull the noises he still heard, the name he stole. Jenz – sad that her tooka was dying. It was old. Thel – worried about not being enough, and missing Shevla because she has to leave him again, travel the stars.

Her daughter Vatari, worried about the children, the finances, how the new vegetable garden is going. Sometimes, just needing someone to talk to.

Eedee will always be there, laid back in her chair in the _karyai_ , with the stories of her family written in the wood in front of her. Scuffs and dents and dings and the marks from hot pots of food. The tree from her homeland, its forest long gone, but still living.

 _Pull up a seat, ad’ika,_ she says, pouring a glass. _It’s late for you to be up._ _Tell me all about it._

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I did change some names, just now. The two boys had placeholder names, originally, and finally I just got tired of looking at them. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused...


End file.
